At the Limits of the Gaze

Overview

About the Guests

Overview

Please join Aperture and Japan Society for a panel discussion celebrating the impact and influence of Takuma Nakahira, a crucial figure within the history of Japanese photography. This special event is organized on the occasion of the release of At the Limits of the Gaze, the first English-language collection of Nakahira’s influential writings on photography. The book’s editors and translators Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard will be joined by assistant curator of photography in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs at the New York Public Library, Maggie Mustard, and manager of Dashwood Books and publisher of Session Press, Miwa Susuda.

At the Limits of the Gaze collects the writings of photographer and critic Takuma Nakahira. Nakahira is best known outside of Japan as a founding member of Provoke, the experimental magazine of photographs, essays, and poetry, and for his important photobook For a Language to Come (1970). Throughout a decades-long career, Nakahira raised incisive questions about visual culture and politics in both his photography and his writing. As part of a dynamic moment of artistic and political experimentation in Tokyo, he wrote on a range of topics hardly limited to photography: art, film, journalism, literature, politics, television, and more. Nakahira’s essays brim with urgency, relentlessly interrogating photography’s relationship to power, the connection between language and images, and the gaze. As Abbe and Prichard write, these texts “both suggest doubt about, and possibilities for, a photographically mediated reckoning with the world.”

This event is presented in partnership with Japan Society. RSVP is required. For more information and to reserve a seat, see here. Use code APERTURE at checkout to receive member pricing on tickets.

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About the Guests

Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015; born in Tokyo) was a photographer and writer. He graduated from the Department of Spanish at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in 1963. In 1968, he cofounded the magazine Provoke with Kōji Taki, Yutaka Takanashi, and Takahiko Okada. His photobooks include For a Language to Come (1970), A New Gaze (1983), Adieu à X (1989), and Documentary (2011). He was also the author of many critical essays and books on photography, media, art, and politics, including Why an Illustrated Botanical Guide? Collected Writings on Images by Takuma Nakahira(1973) and Duel on Photography (1977). His work has been the subject of large-scale retrospective exhibitions at the Yokohama Museum of Art (2003) and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2024), and is included in the collections of other museums around the world.

Daniel Abbe is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Temple University, Japan Campus Kyoto; he also lectures at Osaka University of Arts. He holds a PhD from the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where his dissertation analyzed Nakahira’s photographs and essays at length. He has written on art and photography for Aperture, Japan Forum and X-TRA in English, and for Tokyo Art Beat, Bijutsu Techō and Popeye Web in Japanese. In addition to his work on the translation of At the Limits of the Gaze, he also regularly translates materials related to the archive of the photographer Ōtsuji Kiyoji.

Maggie Mustard is an educator, curator, and art historian focused on the history of photography. She earned her PhD in art history and archaeology from Columbia University, where her dissertation focused on questions of memory and photographic representation in the work of Japanese postwar photographer Kawada Kikuji. She was previously the chief curatorial advisor for the exhibition The Incomplete Araki: Sex, Life, and Death in the Works of Nobuyoshi Araki, the Marcia Tucker Senior Research Fellow at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and visiting assistant professor at Wesleyan University’s Department of Art and Art History. Recent curated or cocurated exhibitions at the New York Public Library include New York Subways 1977: Alen MacWeeney and The Awe of the Arctic: A Visual History.

Franz Prichard is associate professor of Japanese studies at Florida State University. His interdisciplinary research and teaching explore the literature, environmental thought, and visual media of contemporary Japan. In his first book, Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (Columbia University Press, 2019), he explored the ways Japanese writers, artists, and critics reinvented their work in response to Japan’s intensive urbanization. His current research develops transcultural and ecocritical approaches to the study of contemporary Japanese literature and visual media. Weaving together the perspectives of writers, critics, photographers, and artists, among others, this research elaborates ecocritical approaches with a rigorously planetary perspective in pursuit of collaborative ways of knowing the generative relations among humans, animals, material objects, and shared worlds.

Miwa Susuda is manager and photobook consultant at Dashwood Books, New York, as well as the award-winning publisher of Session Press. Her writing on photography has appeared in IMA magazine and The PhotoBook Review. Susuda has been a featured lecturer at art fairs, foundations, and museums worldwide, including Penumbra Foundation, New York, Virtual—Assembly; CONTACT Photo, Toronto; Tokyo Art Book Fair; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York.